What does a powerful foodborne pathogen have to do with everyone’s favorite tablet computer? Read On.
A lot of people have been talking about how great and liberating the iPad is as a travel computer. Michael Gartenberg, for example, notes that besides the usually stated reasons (which includes the device’s impressive battery life) loves how it frees his travel bag from lots of excess weight and is at least for the time being excepted from the TSA’s normal laptop bag removal rules.
iPad aside, if you want, there are plenty of bags out there, such as from Mobile Edge and Skooba Design, that will allow you to leave your laptop inside per special TSA guidelines.
Like Gartenberg, who’s been traveling with his iPad for the last couple of weeks, I also recently brought my iPad with me last week on a business trip to Chicago.
The iPad was intended to be used as an entertainment device for me to use during the evenings, to read books and to brush up on work documents for a consulting gig, and for casual evening browsing away from my work laptop, which also came with me on this trip. However, that’s not what my iPad ended up getting used for.
Let me introduce you to E.coli — one of the most common, yet perhaps one of the most awful little microorganisms on Earth.
Escherichia coli, or E.coli for short, is a tiny little bacterium that grows in warm temperatures, typically in moisture-rich environments. Like many other common food-borne pathogens, it is spread by the consumption of unwashed vegetables or meat.
When you travel and interact with restaurants and hotels as often as I do, you’re bound to strike out. You get sick sometimes, it happens. Any number of common bacteria out there and deficient sanitary practices on part of a restaurant or one of its provisions/produce suppliers could make you ill, not to mention contact with sick people themselves which cause you to pick up the occasional cold, flu or other short-term virus.
The usual remedy for foodborne illness? You take some Imodium, you drink water, take a few Tylenols for the headaches and other pain and within a day you get over it. Usually.
But nothing, and I mean nothing, prepares you for E.coli enteritis.
It started on Monday night. A group of us had dinner in the hotel restaurant — it was reheated frozen Chicago-style pizza from one of the established local chains and a big bowl of Caesar salad.
Wanting to eat healthier, I had two slices of pizza and a big heaping pile of Caesar Salad — the primary ingredient being Romaine Lettuce.
What happened over the next twelve hours is indescribable. I transformed from my normal, weary-from-first-day-of-travel self to someone who felt like they were going to die.
I’m going to spare you of the gory, awful details of what happens when you get food poisoning from E.coli. If you’re interested, you can read up on it here.
Over the next 12 to 24 hours, my body began to ache along with flu-like symptoms and a fever, and I developed a case of extreme gastrointestinal distress and abdominal cramps. While I was able to work (barely) on Tuesday, it quickly turned into a never-ending battle between the Conference room and the Men’s room.
I evacuated liters of water as fast as I was able to consume it, and the thought of putting any food into my body was nauseating. For two days I literally had to force feed myself basic starchy foods and protein.
Tylenols were able to stave off some of the pain, fever and headaches, but the Imodium I had purchased at the local Walgreens proved to be useless — and as I found out later, is not recommended for treating the symptoms of infection from this particular vicious pathogen as it can prolong it from being evacuated from your body.
It was Tuesday when I also figured out and confirmed what had likely nailed me.
After meeting with the hotel’s management, we discovered the in-house restaurant had been using one of the brands of bagged, chopped Romaine lettuce destined for food service that had been recalled in 23 states that had been contaminated with E.coli O145, one of the pathogenic, but extremely rare Shiga toxin producing variants of the common foodborne bacterium.
E.coli also comes in other wonderful varieties, such as the well-documented O157:H7, and it was certainly possible I was nailed with that, or even one of the other common foodborne pathogens and not the rarer E.coli O145, but given the “smoking gun” I had to place myself into the unreported victims category. I was now a statistic.
For More Information about Foodborne Illnesses, check out FoodSafety.gov
My desire to eat healthier had actually resulted in a potentially life-threatening situation. The irony of all of this is that If I had just stuck with the mediocre deep-dish pizza, I probably would have been fine.
